If you become an Olympic champion, you can either sit back and bask in the glory of that one moment or you can lay plans to become a legend of your sport. It’s the latter that 800m Olympic gold medallist Keely Hodgkinson has decided to do.
The work to do that begins in the thin, rarefied air of the Pyrenees mountains. At around 6,000 feet in a small French mountain village called Font-Romeu, Hodgkinson got to work with other members of her coaching group including coaches Trevor Painter and his wife Jenny Meadows, herself an 800m runner of great repute, winning world championship bronze in 2009.
Training at altitude, where the air is thinner and there is less oxygen, creates the perfect environment for an elite athlete like Hodgkinson to begin her hard winter regime to prepare for next season.
As Painter explains, training at altitude allows the body to produce more red blood cells naturally to compensate for the lack of oxygen, so when an athlete returns to a lower altitude their base fitness is greater.
It’s a good start for any athlete and a well-trodden path for most elite Olympic athletes.
For Hodgkinson, she plans to pack her 2025 season with ambitions that complement those of an Olympic champion.
Rewinding to that glorious night in Paris in August, I asked Hodgkinson whether she knew she was going to win the gold medal before the race even began. “Mmmm, yeah,” she replied, laughing and smiling without coming across as arrogant.
She just knew she could and probably would win the race. At 22 years of age, she was in the best physical condition of her young career, having set a new British 800m record just a matter of weeks before the Olympic final.
Hodgkinson believed in destiny and that it was her night, and so it proved to be as she produced one of the most dominant displays on the track in Paris.
So back to what Hodgkinson is doing in the Pyrenees. It’s because she and her coaches believe the Brit can become one of the true greats of track and field.
At 19, Hodgkinson burst onto the global scene by winning the 800m silver medal at the Tokyo Olympics. Pretty much nobody outside the English athletics scene had heard of her at that moment, but those who had knew she was already something special.
Two World Championship silver medals followed before that golden evening at the beginning of August, and gold changes everything.
“It’s amazing, crazy, the difference between silver and gold,” Hodgkinson says, explaining being recognised more regularly and the increasing opportunities to do things away from athletics.
Some of those have come in fashion, an industry she is passionate about, while she also received VIP treatment from Manchester United as she was honoured on the pitch at Old Trafford in front of 75,000 fans.
Hodgkinson, from Atherton just outside Manchester, is a lifelong fan of the club. Her family, also United supporters, proudly watched as she showed off her gold medal to the crowd and received a framed shirt with her Olympic 800m winning time printed on it – along with the very fitting number ‘1’.
Meadows knows a thing or two about the 800m and predicts that Hodgkinson can dominate the sport.
“It can’t be silver and bronze anymore. She can dominate the sport and become a legend.”
And that starts with the 2025 season, where Hodgkinson along with her coaches will carefully choose her race schedule for what looks set to be a very busy year.
The European Indoor Championships in the Netherlands and World Indoor Championships in China are both in March, before the highlight of the outdoor season comes at the World Championships in Japan in September.
There are other ambitions too, in the form of records. But while there is certainty over the target in competition, the approach to the stopwatch is “when it happens it happens”.
Painter and Meadows have such belief in Hodkinson’s talent that they think she will be able to break the 800m indoor and outdoor world records.
The indoor record is perhaps the easier of the two to break. The 800m outdoor world record was set in July 1983 and is the oldest world record left on the books in track and field, with the time of 1:53.28 viewed for years as untouchable.
Hodgkinson though is clearly getting quicker and quicker and is potentially still years from reaching her potential. Her personal best, the sixth fastest 800m of all time, is just over a second off Jarmila Kratochvilova’s world record, but already there is a sense that Hodgkinson is very capable of running sub 1:54s.
Hodgkinson is not only the world’s best 800m runner, but very handy over 400m too, so speed is an attribute in hand.
Despite Hodgkinson’s success, the 22-year-old remains down to earth, approachable and fun. Friends and family are her rock, while Painter and Meadows are like a second family. Their daughter Arabella knows Hodgkinson only as “Auntie Keely”.
Those two not only keep Hodgkinson grounded, but organise her schedule, allowing her space and time away from athletics and a working schedule which focuses her on nothing other than the training regime at hand.
They joke, smile, and laugh, but continue to work hard as a unit.
While sat on a rock recovering after a 35-minute ‘warm-up’ run at 6,000 feet not far from Font-Romeu, Hodgkinson says: “I asked for Sundays off from Trev. He said become Olympic champion and you can.”
I asked if he had stuck to his word, to which she enthusiastically confirmed, while gulping for more air to recover.
A chuckling Painter watching on from a few yards away, with wicked timing and humour, says: “She has a hard strength and conditioning session now in the gym… and at altitude, you’ll enjoy this!”
With this atmosphere, there appears to be little doubt that 2025 will be another year where Hodgkinson further enhances her position as one of Britain’s current sporting greats.